József Debreczeni’s letter from the land of the dead

A rediscovered memoir from an Auschwitz survivor offers powerful lessons for our own reckonings with the Holocaust.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for The New Statesman

(Fototeca Gilardi / Bridgeman Images)

‘József Debreczeni’s book describing his experience in Auschwitz has been slow coming to English readers, but may well have arrived at just the right time. Debreczeni was the pen name of József Bruner. Born in Budapest in 1905, a poet, playwright, novelist, translator and reporter, he was the editor of Hungary’s daily newspaper Napló in Subotica, and then the illustrated weekly Ünnep in Budapest, before Hungary’s increasingly punitive anti-Jewish laws cost him his job in 1938. Existence in wartime for Hungary’s Jews was grim, but still just about possible. That changed with the Nazi occupation in March 1944. In May, the transportation of Jewish people to Auschwitz-Birkenau began. In eight weeks, 420,000 were forced into cattle trucks, including Debreczeni’s mother and father, and his wife, Lenka Bruner. By June all three had been murdered. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum there is a letter from his father, Fábián Bruner, begging a humanitarian worker for news of his wife, Sidonia. She was already dead. By the end of the war, around 560,000 Hungarian Jews had been killed.’

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